Four Zimbabwean independence fighters had shot up a police station, and Ian Smith’s rogue colonial government had tasked Savory’s Tracker Combat Unit with finding them.
He didn’t mention his central role in developing the tracking technique of the Selous Scouts, who massacred thousands of civilians during the war, using everything from machine guns to anthrax.
Savory called his theory holistic rangeland management, but today it’s known by many monikers, including regenerative ranching, rotational foraging, and adaptive multi-paddock grazing.
As evidence of the ranching sector’s environmental impact has grown undeniable — climate scientists calculate that beef alone produces a quarter of all food emissions and ecologists estimate it causes more than half of global deforestation in some areas — regenerative ranching has become a popular counterpoint for the industry’s defenders.
Though Allan Savory developed his method in colonial Rhodesia and had published it by 1980, regenerative ranching remained a fringe theory until cattle baron Ted Turner broadcast Savory’s talk on YouTube in 2013.
Later that year, another film debuted, perhaps the first documentary focused on building soil carbon through ranching.
Shell’s interest in promoting regenerative ranching was a classic carbon offset scheme — in the words of the film’s director, “What if these oil companies used their money to help ranchers transition to AMP grazing, and then shared in the credits for the carbon being stored in the soil?” With a pitch like that, he landed a grant.
This money was distributed among at least fourteen professors from Arizona State and other land grant universities, including a Michigan State scholar named Jason Rowntree, who secured a massive $19 million grant for regenerative ranching research from donors like Butcher Box and the Noble oil fortune in 2021.
Despite some questionable statistical decisions — not replicating control samples, averaging scatter-plot data, and using a linear regression model that didn’t account for soil carbon saturation — Rowntree’s analysis nonetheless demonstrated the farm had been lying to consumers about generating net-negative emissions.
Regardless, White Oak Pastures continues to advertise its meat as emissions-negative.
Countless soil carbon NGOs and certification programs have sprouted up in the past decade, forming a veritable ranching public-relations complex, ranging from grassroots-flavored groups like Regeneration International to massive marketing academies astroturfed by conglomerates like Cargill, Nestlé, and General Mills.
The pipeline from corporate finance to public research is institutionalized through benign-sounding entities like the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research , an agency established in the 2014 US Farm Bill that distributes private research funding to public institutions.
NRCS soil specialist Ray Archuleta toured all fifty states during his thirty-year government career before establishing his own organization, the Soil Health Academy, in 2017.
Kiss the Ground was also the name of a documentary hit in 2020, bringing together a stacked cast of industry legends like Ray Archuleta and Allan Savory as well as Hollywood icons like Woody Harrelson.
FRACKED never made it to reel, ostensibly due to lack of funding; the Tickells instead aired a film called Pump, which promoted fracked methane, after finding a donor in a lobbying firm called the Fuel Freedom Foundation.
Similarly, Kiss the Ground’s debut film, A Regenerative Secret, was produced in partnership with Belcampo, a boutique meat brand that shut down three years later after whistleblowers revealed the company was importing meat and marking up the price after repackaging with regenerative organic labeling.
In addition to Belcampo, numerous other standard-bearing regenerative meat and dairy brands have been exposed in recent years for false advertising, labor abuse, and animal cruelty, including Polyface Farm, Sylvanaqua Farms, White Oak Pastures, and Tillamook Dairy.
Like the oil companies, the meat industry would like us to think it just needs some tweaks and adjustments to solve our ecological crisis.
Worse yet, when assessing the bigger picture and considering its prominent role in driving pollution, hunger, land theft, and species extinction, the ranching industry’s regenerative rhetoric should be regarded as duplicitous as the fossil fuel industry’s empty promises of transition fuels and emissions offsets.
Allan Savory wiped the sweat from his forehead, catching a bead of black dye before it hit his eyes.
Historians would later call it the Rhodesian Bush War, but back then it was just tracking.
It was 1965.